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Have you bred a superior disease resistant plant? Or developed a plant with high vigour and predictable outcomes? If you’re breeding unique varieties of plants, you might want to ensure that only you can commercially benefit from your plants.
Plant Breeders’ Rights enable growers to have exclusive rights to sell, export or produce their unique variety.
Plant Breeders’ Rights are a type of Intellectual Property that lets you market your registered plant variety for a period of 25 years or 30 years if it involves potato varieties, trees and vines.
Why Do I Need Plant Breeders’ Rights?
If you want to profit from your invention, Plant Breeders’ Rights can give you a competitive advantage over the market — enabling you to be the only supplier in the market for a set period of time.
Registering your right gives you the ability to:
- Produce or reproduce the plant variety
- Keep stock of the plant
- Condition (clean, coat, sort, package and grade) the material for propagation
- Sell the plant variety as a product
- Export the material
How Do I Register Plant Breeders’ Rights?
To register Plant Breeders’ Rights, you will need to obtain a UK PBR. In order to do so, the following process is required:
- Create a breeders reference. Each new plant variety needs a unique reference. The name you choose will need to be approved. Once you have selected it, send it over to [email protected] for approval
- Obtain consent for genetically modified plant varieties
- Set up an account on UPOV PRISMA if you don’t already have one and fill out an application for PBR there. A fee will apply.
- Another fee to the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) will also need to be paid. The amount will depend on the variety you are applying for. Find out more here.
- If the variety is considered to be distinct, uniform and stable without any objections, the monthly issue of Seeds Gazette will publish an affirmative decision to accept your variety.
- Plant breeders rights can be applied for all year round. However, if you wanted to trail this year rather than next, it’s important to ensure you make the cutoff date. Check out the national listing closing dates to see what deadlines approach.
If you’d like more information regarding the process of applying for plant breeders rights, the government has published detailed guidelines online.
How Do I Use Plant Breeders’ Rights?
Plant Breeders’ Rights are just one type of Intellectual Property. You may also be able to use Plant Breeders’ Rights alongside other types of Intellectual Property protection, such as patents and trademarks.
Once you have registered your plant variety, it includes the protection of the propagating material of the variety itself and essentially derived varieties.
Essentially derived varieties are varieties of plants that share all essential characteristics of the registered plant variety and could qualify for their own Plant Breeders’ Right application.
Need Help?
Applying for Plant Breeders’ Rights can seem like a daunting task, particularly as there are many steps that need to be carried out.
Our highly experienced Intellectual Property lawyers can work with you to make sure you can protect your new plant varieties.
Contact us at [email protected] or on 08081347754 to get help protecting your plant variety. In the meantime, keep your invention on the downlow!
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